581. In my view, then, each man is essentially a spirit, controlling an organism which is itself a complex of lower and smaller lives. The spirit's control is not uniform throughout the organism, nor in all phases of organic life. In waking life it controls mainly the centres of supraliminal thought and feeling, exercising little control over deeper centres, which have been educated into a routine sufficient for common needs. But in subliminal states - trance and the like - the supraliminal processes are inhibited, and the lower organic centres are retained more directly under the spirit's control. As you get into the profounder part of man's being, you get nearer to the source of his human vitality. You get thus into a region of essentially greater responsiveness to spiritual appeal than is offered by the superficial stratum which has been shaped and hardened by external needs into a definite adaptation to the earthly environment. Even thus the caterpillar's outside integument is fashioned stiffly to suit larval requirements; while, deeper in the animal, unseen processes of rapid change are going on, in obedience to an impulse not derived from larval life.

The ultimate lesson of hypnotic suggestion, especially in the somnambulic state, is, therefore, that we thus get, by empirical artifices, at these strata of greater plasticity - plasticity not to external but to internal forces - where the informing spirit controls the organism more immediately, and can act on it with greater freedom.

This conception seems to throw light on a fact repeatedly observed, but hitherto hard of explanation. The somnambulic state seems to be the introduction to two powers apparently quite disparate - the self-sanative and the telæsthetic. The highest development of sleep thus involves at once more penetrative bodily recuperation, and more independent spiritual activity. The spirit is more powerful either to draw metetherial energy into the organism, or to act in partial independence of the organism. The cases already cited of "travelling clairvoyance " have, in fact, generally occurred during sleep-waking states, originally induced for some healing purpose. I take this to mean that the spirit can in such states more easily either modify the body, or partially quit and return to the body. In other words, it can for the time either pay the body more attention, with benefit, or less attention, without injury. I use the word attention because, in the impossibility of conceiving how a spirit can affect or control an organism, the most fitting term seems to be that by which we designate our own attempts at concentrating the personality.

I would say in crude terms that the soul keeps the body alive by attending to it, and (as explained in Chapter IV (Sleep).) can attend to central operations more directly than to superficial ones - to the activities of sleep more directly than to those of waking. Hence in deep states it can partially withdraw attention from the organism and bestow it elsewhere, while remaining capable of at once resuming its ordinary attitude towards that organism. Bodily death ensues when the soul's attention is wholly and irrevocably withdrawn from the organism, which has become from physical causes unfit to act as the exponent of an informing spirit. Life means the maintenance of this attention; achieved, in this view, by the soul's absorption of energy from the spiritual or metetherial environment. For if our individual spirits and organisms live by dint of this spiritual energy, underlying the chemical energy by which organic change is carried on, then we must presumably renew and replenish the spiritual energy as continuously as the chemical. To keep our chemical energy at work, we live in a warm environment, and from time to time take food.

By analogy, in order to keep the spiritual energy at work, we should live in a spiritual environment, and possibly from time to time absorb some special influx of spiritual life.